


Jie Jie

by viggorlijah



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, PoC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-23
Updated: 2010-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:23:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viggorlijah/pseuds/viggorlijah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The name they use on the small obituary in the Times is not the one she was born with, but it's the one she chose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jie Jie

**Author's Note:**

> For the Blind Banker episode.

The name they use on the small obituary in the Times is not the one she was born with, but it's the one she chose.

_Tan Soo Lin  
1977-2010  
Sadly missed by her friends at the British Museum  
_  
There is no family. The paperwork that brought her into the U.K. on a student visa lists only an aunt, deceased exactly twenty-one months later. It was excellent paperwork after all.

No-one clips the obituary out. John Watson misses it because he buys the Guardian.

  
There is the autopsy. Molly takes a picture of the seventeen tattoos on Soo Lin's body, and notes in her careful print that three of them match another John Doe. When she's finished, she tucks the cloth round Soo Lin again. She does plenty of young people - London's not kind, and Molly's very good at her job, so she rarely sees a natural cause these days - but not often her age. The birth certificate claims thirty-three, but Molly's fairly sure that Soo Lin's a few more than that from her body. She wonders about the child or children she had, about the healed fractures on her feet, the scar on her thigh.

Sometimes, Molly makes up stories for her people, but she's too tired to do that tonight.

Instead, she closes Soo Lin's folder and sets it aside on her desk. She goes down to the other end of the mortuary and finds D-37 and unlocks it. The John Doe slides out, and she wheels him over to A-35. She doublechecks and yes, it's there. The curve of their noses, the jawline, the underlying bone structure.

She slides their slabs back, and because in the end, it's her bloody mortuary, and she can be sentimental once she's done all her work properly and to excellent standards - she turns their heads a little. Brushes Soo Lin's hair back and says to her "Your brother's here, alright. It's alright."

Molly turns off the lights. In the morning, someone'll be along to transfer Soo Lin to the funeral home. But not yet.

  
There is the funeral. Andy thinks of nicking one of the teapots - the museum has hundreds of them after all - and putting it inside with her, sort of like that ghost money he's read about in Taoist rituals. Or animist? He's not very sure, he specialised in early Dutch after all. But he wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do or not, and now he realises it's too late, as the pleasant woman from the funeral home reads a poem about the sea and wind, and really, Andy thinks, Soo Lin probably wouldn't have liked that, one her teapots cracked and turned to ashes.

He does buy a teapot, a good reproduction, a few weeks later, and he reads The Book of Tea and when he has a cup, when it's been a long day and he remembers Soo Lin, it's a bit like watching her pour the cups and explain what it meant to the visitors. Seeing something beautiful happen very quietly.

But at the funeral, all he can think of is that someone ought to be crying. That he wishes he had known her well enough to cry for her.

  
There is the apartment. Jamila, who hired Soo Lin when she was still at the V&amp;A, rings the landlord. Soo Lin had asked her for a letter of reference when she'd applied for the flat, and she still had the number. She didn't have any family, she explains over the phone.

Part of it's policy. When Dr Robinson died, they found boxes of stuff he'd borrowed (politely put) under his bed. He was using a ceremonial Yoruba bowl for his _keys_.

Send me your CV, she'd told Soo Lin after watching her restore a plate from their Iranian collection. She had the knack for seeing what had once been on a smashed plate, flowers uncurling again after centuries.

Matilda'd been pissed at her poaching one of their most promising young restorers, but Jamila thought it only even after she'd taken Peter who could recreate fabric from burnt threads.

The landlord let her in. "D'you need some boxes?" he asked after a moment. The lights were off, and the flat smelt - disturbed. Not off, but unsettled. It was the way it had been rummaged through, fingerprint powder still visible on the counters, purple gloves left in the wastebin near the door.

"No, I'll manage. It's just to check there's nothing from the museum."

He nods and makes to go. Jamila's suddenly desperate not to be left alone, in the apartment of a dead girl.

"Have you - where will it all go?" she asked before he closes the door.

"Police gave me some numbers to call. Charity'll come round and collect what'll sell. The furniture's with the flat. The rest'll be binned, I suppose."

Something must show in her face, she realises because he lets go of the door and asks gently, "Were you friends?"

"She didn't have friends, really. But I hired her, you see." She bites her lip to keep from talking, telling a stranger what she now realises.

She reminded me of myself. She was so determined, so focussed on her work. She was so bright, and it's not an easy field. People think it is, that art history's something you do when you're not clever enough for the other subjects, but Soo Lin was going to be brilliant. She earned her masters in a year while she was working, she came to me, our last conversation before the day she quit, that awful fucking day - she wanted me to recommend a doctoral programme. I said I'd think about it because I knew she should go to Frankfurt, but I didn't want to lose such a bloody good restorer. I should've sent her there. Not let her quit and thought it was just stress, just temporary. I should've known.

"I thought highly of her," she says at last.

"No harm if you want to take something," he suggests. "There's some things the police took, photos and such. But if you'd like a book or something." His voice trails off and in the awkward silence, Jamala takes a breath and reminds herself that she's 52, and head of the British Museum's antiquities restoration department, and here to do a job.

"Thank you," she says and goes into the flat.

She takes a vase. It's modern, possibly expensive. She doesn't recognise the make or artist. But when she holds it up, the china is so thin it's translucent and there is the suggestion of clouds or blossoms somehow moving within.

There are two books borrowed from the department library. And on the desk, a manuscript held together by binder clips and a stack of notebooks. Most of them are in Chinese, but the diagrams are labelled in English, and the manuscript, with all the notes on it, is mostly English. Iranian Influences in Kangxi pottery manufacturing.

She wraps her cardigan around the vase, tucks it into her bag carefully, nestled against the pages of Soo Lin's unfinished work.

  
There is the blog. "Sherlock, do you remember the surname of that girl, the chinese girl from the museum?"

Sherlock lifts his head for a moment from the microscope on the kitchen table. John's taken to working at the table too. There's most of a dead dog spread out on a tarp (he's taken to stocking up on them in the cupboard under the stairs) and at least in here, it's warm and he can make tea. Sherlock insists that the heater has to be off for an experiment, but John's fairly sure it's because he's too stubborn to admit he doesn't know how to fix a boiler while Mrs Hudson's away.

"Soo Lin."

"That was her first name," John says patiently. "Her full name."

Sherlock shrugs and goes back to his bloodslides. John thinks about texting Lestrade or something, and then sighs and begins typing.

"Her name was Soo Lin and she had long black hair and a soft gentle voice," he writes.

  
There is the past. The family, in Changhsa, and then a town, a village, a house and the night that Soo Lin stopped being Hui An, and became the girl. Then there are the years on the streets with a little brother, and the old woman who helped her find a job and the aunty who helped her find a better job, and the first tattoo, and the second.

There is the night she got the scar on her thigh, but she still wasn't Soo Lin then. She'd had a lot of names then, and the only one that counted was Jie Jie. And oh he did well. She got him into secondary school, and she could have gotten him into university if she had had a boy, but she had a daughter, and -

_ That night, she died quickly. Seconds between her last goodbye to her xie-xie, and the final thought. She'd often wondered what she would think about in the last moments, during all those times she thought were last hours, last days. But now, she'd been surprised and pleased to find that she didn't think. She  _ felt _ . Kissing her daughter's head, summer nights dancing, her brother running down the stairs to see her, her father swinging her up and up and away - _

\- and then in 2001, her brother tells her that he's made a deal and gives her a passport, an air ticket, paperwork that says she is Tan Soo Lin. And she weeps and slaps him, but he shows her the fresh tattoo, still red at the edges, on his shoulder and tells her that she must go tonight.

"Who will I be?" she asks him at the airport.

"Tan Soo Lin is very clever," he tells her. He is wearing a windbreaker and sunglasses, and he is still shorter than her, a little. She wonders if he will grow any more, if she will see him then, someday a tall stranger in a crowd who she won't recognise. "She is brave and clever and good," he says.

"I can't do this," she whispers. "Let me stay here. I'd rather die here."

"Go," he says. "They're watching us."

  
On her paperwork, she is fluent thanks to an excellent education at a private Catholic school in Taiwan. Her English is terrible, tourist English picked up from the people she is told to entertain, from VCDs of American tv shows she bought when she was sent to Hong Kong.

At Heathrow airport, they take her aside and go through her bags. This, she is used to. But then they apologise and ask her about her aunt who she's staying with, about her plans to study in the U.K., and Tan Soo Lin is only fourteen and a half hours old (accounting for the time difference), and she bursts into tears.

They make her tea, in a chipped mug. A strange woman turns up, and tells them that she's Soo Lin's auntie, the poor girl, she'd lost her parents you see, and well, this is rather difficult for her.

Outside, the woman pulls her into a cab. She counts the pound notes in the envelope Soo Lin passes her. "Enough for a week," she says. "Then you must find your own way."

"Two weeks," Soo Lin says, looking out of the window at the grey city passing by. "And you must take me to a bank first."

  
She runs out of money quickly. Even her brother could not imagine how expensive this city is. Her paperwork includes the scholarship papers, and she goes for her interview a month after she arrived in a coat she stole from one of the men she slept with for money. It doesn't fit well, but it's warm.

"Art History," she says. "I'd like to work at a museum."

They're open for hours and hours, and always warm and welcoming. The people there explain things to her, and there's the libraries (she has a card!) and she can borrow books and go to the galleries and sit and read and draw and write, as long as she likes.

  
She makes friends, sleeps with men because they make her laugh unexpectedly or because they're kind. She settles into the life of Soo Lin, studying and going out, working to make ends meet, and perfectly normal. The auntie calls her every month and Soo Lin pays her in cash.

A year and nine months after Heathrow, she thinks she sees her brother for a moment. He's taller, in a black coat and white trainers. She almost calls out to him, but instead she stands very still and looks at him. Across the cafe, he looks back.

She doesn't remember him leaving, only being asked by the cafe staff if she needs another cup of tea. She'd knocked hers over somehow.

There was a message left with her flatmate. Her aunt had died that afternoon. No, she says, we weren't close. I won't be attending the funeral.

She finds her own flat a little while later. Her aunt left her an unexpected windfall, she explains.

Soo Lin, she decides, doesn't have to like people. She doesn't have to make people like her. Soo Lin can spend the day in the library and not say a word to other people.

Soo Lin is now a loner, a weirdo, that weird chinese girl. Soo Lin comes second in her class, held back by her English which is still awkward, but the next year, she's first, and Soo Lin graduates with no-one applauding for her, but she withdraws seven hundred pounds, buys a ticket to Paris and spends two weeks in the Louvre, and that's _better_.

She eats instant noodles in a cup in the tiny hotel room, her eyes closed so she can still see the day's works drifting past. When she sleeps, she dreams of Changsha, and somehow she is a little girl again, only this time they eat rice and turnips off of exquisite antique plates of cobalt and porcelain white, and the world is beautiful.

  
There is the end. Jie-Jie, a man cries to a dead woman. A little girl looks at a photograph kept in an envelope under her pillow, and traces the curve of her own eyebrows. A woman writes Tan Soo Lin 2010 on a file box and carefully places a manuscript inside.

A teapot gleams under the hot splash of freshly brewed tea.


End file.
